Page:Dangerous Business (1927).pdf/72

 "It'll be all I need."

On Fifth Avenue near Thirty-fourth Street, he left his wife. He paid off the cab, with the tip expected from a man just married, and walked to the Grand Central.

Married! Married! He had married Lida Haige. How strange, how constrained, how bound, to be. . . married. If you felt it so. Lida didn't; she felt far, far more freed. Back on Fifth Avenue, she was spending her own money for her own things. How quickly she had yielded on Europe and Bermuda. Too quickly; she only had put off, he knew, this matter of her managing Europe, for both of them, on her money.

He counted, with a bit of panic, the amount remaining of the thousand dollars which Ellen Powell had handed him. Nine hundred and twelve; now tickets for two for Tryston, and the berths; no, a compartment, of course.

Western Union! He wrote on the yellow pad his father's name and office address; and wrote, "I have married Lida."

In a yellow envelope, it would be laid upon his father's desk; and he thought not of his father but of Ellen Powell opening it. How little she looked in his father's big chair with her toes not quite touching the floor!

At the appointed pillar in the Pennsylvania station, he met Lida; very slim and smart she stood. A red cap held a new, small, smart bag.

"I've the tickets," said Jay. "Shall we go out to the train? It's ready."

The porter, knowing the newly married, quickly departed after the bags were placed in the compartment. He closed the door behind him, Lida and Jay stood in